The Five Essential Kinks Records

Something Else (1967)

The psychedelic sound was spilling out of Britain and the Bay Area, and the Kinks didn’t quite fit in. But at the beginning of “David Watts,“ this album’s excellent opener, we hear the backward masked count-off played in a trippy nod to fashion, followed by some fa fa fa’s that had mutated from la la la’s. There is nothing psychedelic about the rest of the song—it’s an old-fashioned character study—nor about the rest of the album, from the roistering “Harry Rag“ to the gorgeous closer, “Waterloo Sunset.“ Articulated in the first few seconds of the record is Ray Davies’s peculiar response to the 60s’ emphasis on new sounds: Despite a superficial nod to modish weirdness, he was more interested in what he could make of the past. Later albums would sound positively regressive, and more interesting than just about anything else in popular music.

Photo: Courtesy of Reprise Records

Arthur (1969)

Arthur is the soundtrack to a movie that was never made. Ray Davies and the BBC had planned to make a musical, but the project fell through, and what we are left with is a big, baggy record that tells an oblique story about life in the twilight of the British empire. Musically, it’s a fascinating mess. It starts out with the optimistic rocker “Victoria“ (I was born, lucky me / In a land that I love), and before arriving at the closing track, a song of consolation for the beleaguered everyman, Ray and the Kinks have sketched the end of the empire: The pleasures of driving in the country Pax Britannica (“Drivin’ “) come to seem naive after a generation of young men are decimated by world war (“Some Mother’s Son“). It’s an ambitious record that shouldn’t have worked, but Ray’s sense of melody and the band’s versatility totally sell it. They would reattempt the concept record again and again, but never so successfully. Pick up the extended, remastered version for the collected singles “Mindless Child of Motherhood,“ “Plastic Man,“ and “King Kong.“

Photo: Courtesy of Reprise Records

Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround—Part 1 (1970)

If the character studies on Something Else were traditional, they seem stilted at times; the precise self-knowledge of the narrator of “David Watts“ (I am a dull and simple lad / Cannot tell water from Champagne) is a little hard to believe. The music is top-notch, but the lyrics lack a feeling of interiority—a minor criticism that is only fair to level in light of the fresh and effortless Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround—Part 1. (There would be no part two.) The narrator in these songs is wholly submerged in the music, particularly in the landmark “Lola,“ but no less in the unemployment ballad “Get Back in Line.“ The album, possibly their best, also contains some of Ray Davies’s most personal work in the record-industry-attack songs “The Moneygoround“ and “Denmark Street.“ But somehow his brother/rival Dave Davies’s aching “Strangers“ manages to occupy the emotional center of the record.

Photo: Courtesy of Reprise Records

Muswell Hillbillies (1971)

Muswell Hillbillies is the apotheosis of Ray’s regressive/psychedelic approach, even more so than The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. By this record, they sound more like the Band or the Allman Brothers than the group that recorded “You Really Got Me.“ They’ve grafted ragtime, blues, and music hall onto twentieth-century England, conflating the Davies’s neighborhood, Muswell Hill, with the Beverly Hillbillies to produce the title track, and the nearby town of Holloway with Delta blues in the stark “Holloway Jail.“ Other standouts are “Alcohol,“ “Oklahoma U.S.A.,“ and “Skin & Bones.“ A succinct summary of Ray’s approach is found in the opener, “20th Century Man“: I’m a twentieth-century man / But I don’t want to be here. By the rootsy American sound of the rest of the record, he didn’t want to be in England, either.

Photo: Courtesy of Rhino Records

Everybody’s in Show-Biz (1972)

Everybody’s in Show-Biz is a double album. The first half is a studio record with all new material, the second a live recording of songs from the previous few outings. The first half showcases what had made the Kinks so formidable in the ’60s and early ’70s—their adaptability; light touch; and how, unlike the Beatles, they always sounded like a band—and the second reveals the faults that would undermine their flabby concept records until 1978’s partial return to form, Misfits. The sentimental lyrics of “Celluloid Heroes“ are saved from bathos by a classic Ray Davies’s melody—lovely, delicate, and inevitable from the first phrase. Much of the rest of the album is about celebrity—“Sitting in My Hotel,“ the “Apeman“ reminiscent “Supersonic Rocket Ship“—but none of the songs on this underrated record would do well on the charts, and the Kinks thereafter started to unravel, with most of the original members leaving and the quality of the songwriting tanking. In its successes and failures, it’s a fitting elegy for the least appreciated, most versatile British band to survive the ’60s. —Ben Phelan

The psychedelic sound was spilling out of Britain and the Bay Area, and the Kinks didn’t quite fit in. But at the beginning of “David Watts,“ this album’s excellent opener, we hear the backward masked count-off played in a trippy nod to fashion, followed by some fa fa fa’s that had mutated from la la la’s. There is nothing psychedelic about the rest of the song—it’s an old-fashioned character study—nor about the rest of the album, from the roistering “Harry Rag“ to the gorgeous closer, “Waterloo Sunset.“ Articulated in the first few seconds of the record is Ray Davies’s peculiar response to the 60s’ emphasis on new sounds: Despite a superficial nod to modish weirdness, he was more interested in what he could make of the past. Later albums would sound positively regressive, and more interesting than just about anything else in popular music.